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Turkey

The covers of the books featured in the list
Your #IWD2023 Reading List
By Words Without Borders
In honor of International Women’s Day 2023, WWB recommends 10 forthcoming books written and translated by women and published by small presses.
Portrait of writer Deniz Dağdelen Düzgün
The City and the Writer: In Izmir with Deniz Dağdelen Düzgün
By Nathalie Handal
The thing that surprises me the most is that parchment paper was invented in Izmir.
A dark room where only a small sliver of window lets in any light
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
A Friendly Face
By Sevgi Soysal
Just what she needed. An outing with a man just released from prison.
Translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely
PEN International Celebrates 100 Years
By Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
PEN members today not only gather for literary events in their home countries and internationally but also defend writers and the freedom to write worldwide.
Tribades
By Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu
“Whatever you do in Turkey, you do it alone.”
Translated from Turkish by Ralph Hubbell
Elfiye
By Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu
They looked at me like I was sick.
Translated from Turkish by Ralph Hubbell
Peripatetics: The Essays of Jazmina Barrera, Karen Villeda, and Mariana Oliver
By Charlotte Whittle
These are essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and intellectual spaces with the same ease with which we used to walk around in New York.
Özdamar’s Tongue
By Mariana Oliver
Özdamar knew that arriving in a country with no return ticket meant voluntarily surrendering to an indeterminate foreignness.
Translated from Spanish by Julia Sanches
The Desire to Travel Responsibly Must Come before the Desire to Learn through Literature
By Tomaso Biancardi
There is a surer way for international literature to make us better tourists.
The Importance of Stories in an Era of Division
By Elliot Ackerman
With much of our world deeply divided, stories such as these become more essential than ever to ease our collective pessimism.
Muzaffer and Bananas
By Yalçın Tosun
We were both quite fat, but Ali’s body carried more promise than mine.
Translated from Turkish by Abby Comstock-Gay
The Canary
By Deniz Tarsus
Every night before they went to sleep, the people of the village imagined their own deaths.
Translated from Turkish by Ayça Türkoğlu
All the Streets of the City
By Behçet Çelik
“From here on out it’s rooftop to rooftop, hocam.”
Translated from Turkish by Abby Comstock-Gay
The Terrorist Upstairs
By Emrah Serbes
I’m twelve years old, I won’t have to do a lot of time, I’ll be out before you know it.
Translated from Turkish by Abigail Bowman
Garine
By Karin Karakasli
“Erzurum is a wound I carry inside me.”
Translated from Turkish by Ayça Türkoğlu
The Little Bathroom
By Sine Ergün
Did she or her housemates know about the secret of the bathroom?
Translated from Turkish by Ayça Türkoğlu
“It’s Us and Them”: Writing from and about Divided Countries
By Susan Harris
In the current environment of relentless political strife . . . debate deteriorates into name-calling; partisans morph into zealots, complex issues are reduced to binary terms, and hostility seethes just beneath the surface.
The Angels Who Wiped My Fate Clean
By Kemal Varol
I was bound. I was a registered piece of inventory. I was a liability. I wasn’t going anywhere.
Translated from Turkish by Dayla Rogers
And What If Love Is Stronger? The Queer Issue
By Susan Harris
In this troubling context, the need for portrayals of queer lives around the world becomes even more urgent.
June 2017 Queer Where Are You My Love Beldan Sezen Feature
Where Are You, My Love?
By Beldan Sezen
© 2017 Beldan Sezen. Translation of the text © 2017 Charlotte Collins. Translation of the signs and newspaper headlines © 2017 Canan Marasligil. All rights reserved.
Translated from German by Charlotte Collins & Canan Marasligil
Multimedia
The Minibus
By Naz Tansel
What do you want us to do, sit on their heads?
Translated by Canan Marasligil
An Endless Green Line
By Gianluca Costantini & Elettra Stamboulis
Every town had two soccer teams. A right-wing one and a left-wing one.
Translated from Italian by Jamie Richards
Comics and Graphic Narratives: A Global Cultural Commons
By Dominic Davies
Comics themselves have a role to play in the construction of a more globally aware social consciousness.
The Gold Watch
By Mely Kiyak
''The clock inside has no numbers, it has only memories.''
Translated from German by Rebecca Heier
from “The Lost Lands of Paradise”
By Yavuz Ekinci
Aram's mutilated body on that tree had grown larger and larger in my mind.
Translated from Turkish by Kardelen Kala
Omaira
By Murathan Mungan
You had no name when we met / we did not notice it wasn’t there
Translated from Turkish by Aron Aji & David Gramling
Multilingual
Breaking the Taboo: Turkish Writers Face the Kurdish Past
By Alber Sabanoglu
We were forced by the state itself to take sides.
Mirror Shock
By Murat Özyasar
If you look in the mirror too long it hits you.
Translated from Turkish by Hardy Griffin
The Nights Passing Endlessly through Scheherazade’s Mouth
By Exmetjan Osman
I was more or less enjoying the daytime / I was watching grass sprout from cracks in the asphalt
Translated from Uyghur by Joshua L. Freeman
Multilingual
An illustration of a girl in a red and white tutu standing on the back of a white horse in front...
Popular Graphic Arts, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Tante Rosa, Would-be Horse Acrobat
By Sevgi Soysal
Rosa would no longer be falling off of horses. Instead, she would bag the manure of the circus animals and sell it to villagers.
Translated from Turkish by Amy Spangler
The Train
By Murathan Mungan
Some weekends my parents and I went from Mardin to Syria and stayed in Kamışlı, the town nearest to the Turkish border. Although it was a town, I compared Kamışlı, with its wide, well-kept roads, its…
Translated from Turkish by Ruth Christie
Ego
By Zehra Çirak
I and my trusty umbrella / he's always at hand
Translated from German by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright
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